It's a freezing-cold Saturday night in Federal Hill, but in a small dressing room above the Funk Box on Cross Street, the company is at least as warm as your average radiator. Everyone's got a Guinness draught can in hand, and they're all telling jokes, poking fun and laughing.
In the doorway, clad in a tuxedo with a kenti cloth cummerbund and matching bowtie, and working on his second or third beer since I've been sitting there (which has been about ten minutes) is Martin O'Malley, mayor of Baltimore and frontman of O'Malley's March, the city's best Irish rock band.
"I started playing Irish music when I was 16 or 17, playing some gigs with my high school football coach," explains O'Malley, but Irish music has been a part of his life for much longer. "About once a year my mother would dress [all the kids] up in Irish sweaters and take us down to the Lizner Auditorium [at George Washington University] to get some culture. And after I started playing, I got really into some of the guys who were new back then, bands like the Wolfetones and eventually The Clancys and Shane MacGowan."
It comes as a bit of a shock the first time you see a picture of the honorable on stage with his band. He looks like Springsteen, with his sleeveless black tee-shirt and sleek cutaway guitar, and you have to keep reminding yourself that this is the man that makes most of the public policy around here.
In person, he's warm and enthusiastic, but with just a hint of that cool tact every politician needs to have in order to avoid showing all of his cards right away. So when someone in the band offers me and my two "photographers" who I've brought along for the fun a few beers, we respectfully decline, half expecting him to card us.
O'Malley's March was started in 1988 as a more folky outfit, with O'Malley, then a lawyer, on guitar, whistle and vocals, accompanied by bassist Frank Schwarz and uillean piper Paul Levin. "The name O'Malley's March came in because 'Schwartz, O'Malley and Levin' sounded too much like an accident firm," quips the mayor. "So I held a vote one day when the other guys weren't around to change the name of the band. They weren't around because that day just happened to be Yom Kippur, but I definitely won." It was good old-fashioned politics from the beginning.
The band used to play at pubs all over the Baltimore/DC/Wilmington area including McGinn's, the regular Mobtown spot, and eventually grew and changed faces as the band expanded its repertoire and put out three records.
Schwartz was replaced on bass by Robert Baum when he moved away from the city. In the past few years, O'Malley's March has suffered terribly from the losses of Baum to a stroke and Levin to brain cancer, both within a few months of one another in 2002.
The Mayor was always the frontman, belting out a wide variety of tunes, from bar songs to fight songs to covers by other similar artists such as Christy Moore, the Saw Doctors, and Black 47, and even some songs written by O'Malley himself. "
We play all the old standards, you know, 'Wild Rover,' 'Moonshiner,' 'Donnell Aboo' ... but to the extent that we play any original stuff, it's mostly stuff that I've written. We mostly just like to take the old Clancy Brothers stuff and crunch it up." They are currently working on a live album, and the band's latest hit, "The Battle of Baltimore," was recently recorded in Meyerhoff Symphony Hall.
So how does the Mayor fit rehearsals, concerts, and songwriting into his busy schedule? It's hard to tell. "We don't practice," he tells me. "We avoid it at all costs. Practice hurts our dollar to note ratio, and practice tends to kill all spontaneity. But really, we just get the songs down and let [fiddler] Jim [Eagan] and [accordion player] Sean [McComiskey] do the really hard stuff."
The other band members nod in assent, but I would soon find out that these guys are just as good as the two traditional "tuneheads" of the group, it's just that they are in charge of rocking out. To my left is Jared Denhard, a smiley guy with thick glasses and curly hair who plays Celtic harp, highland bagpipes, and "Celtic" trombone. Across the room sit bassist Pete Miller, electric guitarist guido Ralph Renaldi and drummer Jamie Wilson, getting oiled up for the show.
I ask the Mayor if the skills he has learned as a performer transfer to the tasks he faces down at City Hall. "The band has been a tremendous help for my mayoral duties," answers. "In both settings I try to surround myself with smart, talented, creative people, and it makes me look good. Plus, a lot of the day job is listening, just like O'Malley's March." He finishes off his Guinness, we snap a few pictures, and leave.
Downstairs on the spring-loaded dance floor of the Funk Box, the JarFlys, a side project of Jimmy's Chicken Shack lead singer Jimi Davies, are finishing up a mediocre set of boring pop-rock. The crowds are just beginning to drift in at about 11 p.m. and will soon become clear that O'Malley's March is the kind of band that doesn't go to an after party when the show is done. The show is the party.
The O'Malley's March set starts out loud, with Jim's fiddle and Sean's box soaring traditional melodies over the bar songs. The Mayor is in top form, banging out heavy chords on his green-finished guitar and dancing around like the Boss. The "Celtic trombone" gives the band a bit of a ska-punk feel, and it goes just fine. The selections alter nate between rowdy songs and traditional dance sets, with Jim and Sean accompanied by loud drum rhythms and electric guitar riffs. It's nothing like the real traditional stuff, but it's not bad as real rock either.
The band crashes through their newest hit hopeful, the upbeat minor-keyed "Battle of Baltimore" about halfway through the set and twice O'Malley pauses and reads an Irish poem or two to the accompaniment of the traditional harp. My photographers and I are swinging Guinnesses in the air, and the crowd is half dancing jigs, half fist-pumping. The Mayor invites Jimi Davies on stage and they sing a Celtic cover of "All the Small Things".
The mayor is singing Blink-182. Everyone is yelling and laughing and the night is still young. The lights don't go down for another 45 minutes and no one can get enough.
or a platinum-selling country singer, it must take a certain dedication to image to convince your fans that you have as little self-confidence as Gillian Welch seems to have. Welch is no stranger to success -- her work on the O Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack earned her Grammy bragging rights and a part in the subsequent making-of movie, Down From the Mountain -- but she's often noted for her depressed, wallflower, "Whiskey Girl" persona. She rarely gives interviews, she is timid, even a bit creepy on stage and her album covers feature photos of her in plain, almost ugly house dresses, looking downright uncomfortable.
In similarly lonesome fashion, the cover of Soul Journey features doodlings that could come from some mental patient's therapy sessions, but don't let the scrawlings distract you. Make no mistake, Gillian Welch, though she's from L.A. and not the Clinch Mountains, is the latest, truest incarnation of Maybelle Carter, and she's got the records to prove it. This one starts with the wistful nursery rhyme poetry of "Look at Miss Ohio", which meanders into a plain, but eloquent rendition of John Hurt's "Make Me A Pallet on Your Floor," with a few of Welch's own lines.
"Make Me A Pallet" and "I Had A Real Good Mother And Father" are the only traditional tracks on the album, and Soul Journey is, in general, more of the minimalist, shoe-gazing bluegrass of Time (The Revelator), rather than the squalid hard-times poetry of her masterpiece records Revival and Hell Among the Yearlings. The lyrical tone of "One Monkey" and "Lowlands" finds Welch on the verge of giving up on life, but that's when she tries the hardest as a singer, her voice rising brilliantly over the guitar leads of David Rawlings and a rhythm section that evokes early Band sessions.
The most brilliant music is lonesome music. If not for heartbreak, liquor, and death, there would be no genius, from Liszt all the way to Lennon. The question, then, with Gillian Welch is, do you want to.
